Now that I have a reasonable demonstration piece of music I thought I would post this work in progress. I bought a “first act” strat copy at my local guitar center for less than $50 as I remember.
In this case I followed some advice Ron Sword gave me and removed the fret board by using an iron and a sharp tile prying tool. I defretted the fret board and back filled with plastic wood (enbiggen the pictures above and you can see the back-fill). I then mounted the fretboard on a piece of wood to allow me use my shallow fret saw with my good, but tall, miter box. In here lies a mistake I made – the mounted fret board wasn’t completely square – but much more so than cutting by hand. I proceeded to cut about 30 slots for the new frets. I used Experimental Musical Instrument’s fret calculator for fret placement. Once fretted I went through a few cycles of fret leveling, truss rod adjustment and stringing the guitar. I have to say that letting the guitar sit for about a week after adjusting the truss rod had a very positive effect.
Leave a Reply